In article <4vM88.51661$p4.3061 / news.easynews.com>,
Aidan Mark <ahumphr / DELETEgmx.net> wrote:
>
>Where will Ruby simply be indespensible and "competing" languages like
>Python, Perl and Java simply not do?
>
I did a search for Ruby on the perlmonks.org site a few weeks back and
found that over the last few months there have been several positive
mentions of Ruby there in the heart of Perldom. The one I liked best:
"Ruby is Perl's prettier younger sister". Perl refugees looking for a
much cleaner way for doing OO will continue to make up a big part of the
Ruby user base.
As far as Ruby niches go, I think we need to look in to creating modules
that would get Ruby widely installed. For example, what if we were to
come up with a killer version control system written in and
configurable with Ruby that would compete with and
be seen as a replacement for CVS? If it was good people would use it and
Ruby would get installed. How about the discussion about a 'make'
replacement that was big here a few months back? Same story, if we had a
viable make replacement that was Ruby based it would help spread Ruby.
Other niches/strengths:
* Testing - Ruby has a lot of unit testing resources. Could probably use
more 'black-box' functional testing tools.
* dRuby - its so much easier to use than the XML-RPC or SOAP schemes out
there (no http servers to set up) and it is probably also much more
bandwidth efficient (XML being verbose when compared to Ruby's Marshal format).
* Ruby Cocoa - seems to make Ruby a very attractive scripting language for
MacOSX. (perhaps it needs to be promoted more in the OSX community?)
* Webrick - I'm not too knowledgable in this area, but from what I've read
here it makes it a whole lot easier to set up http servers (servlets) than
Java (maybe someone can compare how it's done with Webrick and how it's
don in Java?)
Others?
Phil